Pentagon reveals radical plan to check your ID using sensors in your phone to analyse everything from your grip to how you walk

The Department of Defense is funding a new project used to verify identities

It embeds sensors in a smartphone chip that analyze seemingly insignificant personal details, including how a person holds a phone or walks down the street

The hope is that it can soon replace cumbersome and outdated access cards

Pentagon officials say the system could arrive on smartphones in a few years

Seemingly insignificant details about ourselves, like how we hold a phone or walk down the street, could soon be used as a form of identity verification.

The US Department of Defense is funding a project that involves embedding sensors in smartphones to make sure people are who they say they are.

Ultimately, it could be used to grant federal officials and military personnel access to sensitive files on smartphones and computers, or admit them to secure facilities, according to Defense One.

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The US Department of Defense is funding a project that involves embedding sensors in smartphones to make sure people are who they say they are. The tech could replace ID cards

The technology could be available on most mass-market smartphones within the next few years.

It looks for unique identifiers, such as hand pressure and wrist tension when a person grips a phone, as well as analyzes how they walk, in order to identify a person, Steve Wallace, technical director at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), told Defense One.

DISA is a unit of the Pentagon that deals with combat support.

Those personal identifiers are then combined to give each person a 'risk score'.

When the risk score is low, the organization can safely determine that the person's identity has been verified, but if the score is too high, they'll be barred from viewing files or entering secure premises.

The unnamed project is being developed by a private company using DISA funding, Defense One said.

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The project is being developed by a private company using funding from the Defense Information Systems Agency, a unit of the Pentagon (pictured) that handles combat support

The hope is that it will replace outdated common access cards (CAC), or ID cards, which have been used for many years.

The system operates on the same principles as CAC cards, in that it shares encrypted data with a machine to prove a person's identity, Wallace told Defense One.

He added that the private firm is expected to deliver 75 prototypes of the technology to DISA this fall.

Major smartphone companies will embed the technology in semiconductors that power the devices and the firms will likely have to update smartphone models to use the tool.

Officials didn't say which smartphone makers and component suppliers would take part in the project.

However, they noted that the capability will be available in 'the vast majority of mobile devices,' Defense One explained.

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IS THE PENTAGON USING AN AMAZON-POWERED 'SPY CLOUD' TO STORE DATA?

The Defense Department will now start to move classified information to the Secret Region of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the first time.

This cloud environment was developed to cater to the intelligence community's needs several years ago.

The US Transportation Command is the division responsible for the movement of equipment and troops around the world.

The department said in December it intended to use AWS's Classified Secret Commercial Cloud Services.

This came after AWS's capabilities were expanded and its services became available to agencies that are not part of the intelligence community.

AWS's contract with the US Transportation Command could mean more business is to come, Nextgov reported.

The Transportation Command is likely to bring on its heels the business of other Defense agencies, as it is seen as the leader in the push to move classified information to the cloud.

The 'AWS Secret Region' has the capability to allow the 17 intelligence agencies to host, analyze and run applications on government data classified at the secret level.

The service is air-gapped—or shut off—from the rest of the internet.

'We foresee it being used quite widely,' Wallace said.

The technology could have other applications beyond just the Pentagon, such as being utilized in other private sectors like the finance industry.

As part of the system, smartphones will also be equipped with a GPS tracker that collects encrypted information about a person's movements, Wallace told Defense One.

The GPS analyzes information about a person's location and raises the risk score if they do anything recent that's out of the ordinary.

It would be separate from the GPS used in mapping and exercise apps like MyFitnessPal, Google Maps or Apple Maps.

For now, the tool won't include any biometric identification tools like a thumbprint or eye scan as officials say they may be too easy to fool.